N.B. i had some damage to my own house during the storms last weekend, which will need to be repaired before winter sets in...accordingly, my time spent with blogging and commentary will be less than normal until the real work gets done...

(the above is my weekly commentary that accompanied my sunday morning links mailing, which in turn was mostly selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion, and also includes other links of interest…if you’d be interested in getting my weekly emailing of selected links that accompanies these commentaries, most coming from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…)

(the above is my weekly commentary that accompanied my sunday morning links mailing, which in turn was mostly selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion, and also includes other links of interest…if you’d be interested in getting my weekly emailing of selected links that accompanies these commentaries, most coming from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…)

"With QE3, we are essentially being bought out with our own money...and unemployment is being used to facilitate this process in a very clever manner. Monetary inflation is currently being offset by labor deflation. The way you avoid collapse is by printing money and stealing assets. The way you avoid inflation is with labor deflation."
– Catherine Austin Fitts

An older video you may have seen before but well worth looking at again. I have a pretty nice beard too. Can I getin on this deal?

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Yet the contention is that the middle class isn't paying it's fair share, and tax rates for them need to rise while the 1%'s needs to be cut because they pay more than their fair share.

Microsoft, HP skirted taxes via offshore units: Senate panel

By Kim DixonPosted 2012/09/20 at 4:08 pm EDT [News Daily]

WASHINGTON, Sep. 20, 2012 (Reuters) — Technology giants Microsoft Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co used offshore units to shield billions of dollars from U.S. taxes by taking advantage of loopholes and stretching the limits of the tax code, a Senate panel said on Thursday.

Calling tax avoidance rampant in the technology sector, the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said tech companies used intellectual property, royalties and license fees in overseas tax havens to skirt U.S. taxes.

The panel subpoenaed internal documents from the companies and interviewed Microsoft and HP officials to compile its report, which uses the companies as case studies.

"The tax practices and gimmicks range from egregious to dubious validity," Democratic Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the panel, said at a news conference.

Officials at HP and Microsoft strongly denied any wrongdoing and noted that tax officials had not objected to the structures.

Levin has been investigating offshore tax evasion for years and often issues reports calling attention to the issue.

Senator Tom Coburn, the top Republican on the panel, signed onto the new report, but he blamed Congress.

"Tax avoidance is not illegal. Congress has created this situation," Coburn said, criticizing the complex tax code and the 35 percent corporate tax rate, among of the world's highest, though few companies pay the statutory rate.

The subcommittee said that from 2009 to 2011, Microsoft shifted $21 billion offshore, almost half its U.S. retail sales revenue, saving up to $4.5 billion in taxes on goods sold in the United States.

This was accomplished, the panel report said, by aggressive transfer pricing, where companies put values on intra-company movement of assets. Corporate units are supposed to use a fair market price to value such transfers, but critics say they are manipulated to minimize tax.

(the above is my weekly commentary that accompanied my sunday morning links mailing, which in turn was mostly selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion, and also includes other links of interest…if you’d be interested in getting my weekly emailing of selected links that accompanies these commentaries, most coming from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…)

note on the graphs used here

in March a year ago the St Louis Fed, home to the FRED graphs, changed their graphs to an interactive format, which apparently necessitated eliminating some of the incompatible options which we had used in creating our static graphs before then...as a result, many of the FRED graphs we've included on this website previous to that date, all of which were all created and stored at the FRED site and which we'd always hyperlinked back there, were reformatted, which in many cases changed our bar graphs to line graphs, and some cases rendered them unreadable... however, you can still click the text links we've always used in referring to them to view versions of our graphs as interactive graphs on the FRED site, or in the case where an older graph has gone missing, click on the blank space where it had been in order to view it in the new format....